13
Although Osborne still could not imagine why the rabbit had been brought along, he was extremely glad of the company, especially now that Makepeace had gone off and left him shackled in a Lumberland Alpine Resteezy in a windy, deserted garden centre just two hundred yards from Dunquenchin. He stroked the rabbit and, in the absence of anything more suitable, fed it a cake wrapper and some wood shavings, which it appeared to enjoy thoroughly. Being locked in confined spaces was becoming second nature to him, he reflected. Were he ever to get out of Honiton alive, he would hereafter only accept house-sitting jobs which offered smallish airing cupboards, or coal bunkers, or larders, where he could sit in the dark with a pile of junk food wondering vaguely whether someone would come along at any minute and kill him.
Did Makepeace intend to kill him? Surely not. Just because he had assumed the alter ego of Loony Gordon, complete with négligé and flip-flops, didn’t mean he was bound by destiny to perpetrate violence. Just because he had furtively experimented with Phototropism for dangerously lengthy periods, and it had turned the balance of his mind so that he honestly no longer had any conception of his actual size – all this did not mean he must behave like King Kong, Gog, Magog and Godzilla rolled into one. And just because he was all sooty and singed and his hair was still smouldering didn’t mean he must automatically assume all the other savage attributes of the Wild Man of Borneo.
Last week, for heaven’s sake, this small, long-haired intellectual contortionist had written a deliberately incomprehensible thousand-word review for The Times Literary Supplement on the subject of Norwegian poetry – quoting much of it in the original language, moreover, with its o’s crossed out, and everything. From such spectacular brainbox ostentation to a state of primal savagery it was surely impossible to plummet in a seven-day period, however eventful or surprising those seven days might somehow conspire to be.
Makepeace was certainly a little unbalanced, however. Even Osborne was obliged to concede it. ‘Seen these before, you tiny minuscule person?’ Makepeace had yelled at Osborne overexcitedly, chucking a fat file of papers at his recumbent friend, on their first reunion in Angela Farmer’s pitch-dark garage. ‘They come from – Dunquenchin!’ In the ghostly illumination shed by Osborne’s feeble torch beam, these papers were revealed to be more – possibly hundreds more – letters from G. Clarke to the author of ‘Me and My Shed’, half of them dwelling quite gratuitously on what a frightful and appalling writer he was, the others filled with drooling fantasy about rubbing green liquid lawn-feed into his skin, or binding his body in a length of half-inch garden hose before imaginatively employing his hardened willy in the greenhouse as a sort of improvised dibber.
As before, Osborne saw straight to the essence of these letters, and took the critical ones to heart.
‘Oh look, oh that’s not fair,’ he wailed, time after time, shuffling the papers for the worst bits and frowning at the smarts of unfair accusation. In the blackness of the garage, his little torch beam skidded madly around the walls and ceiling, as he gesticulated his misery and hurt. ‘Oh, but my Val Doonican piece was one of my best. Oh. Oh, this is vicious, really. And I did mention the knitwear. I even mentioned bright elusive butterflies. These are very unfair, Makepeace. I hope you didn’t read them?’
Makepeace made no reply.
Osborne read some more. ‘Blah blah … garden hose … lily-white skin … blah blah … dibber … blah blah … hang on, what was that dibber bit? Good lord … blah blah … Ah! Listen to this, listen. “I sometimes wonder have you even really been to meet the famous celebrities whose sheds you write about, you make them so uninteresting.”’ Osborne turned off his torch and put his head in his hands. ‘God, that’s so depressing.’
He felt wretched – and not just because ‘famous celebrities’ was a tautology, either. How miserable to contemplate Michelle, ostensibly his friend and colleague, composing these poisonous epistles, doubtless at the same time as he was blithely tapping out his inoffensive weekly column in an adjoining room. It was like finding out not only that your mother never loved you, but that in your infancy she also instigated a detrimental whispering campaign (‘Smelly feet, pass it on’) amongst your family, schoolfriends, teachers and soft toys. For the first time since embarking on this disastrous adventure to the West Country, he seriously wanted to cry.
Meanwhile Makepeace, whose figure he could only faintly discern in the blackness, shuffled with impatience.
‘What about the others?’ Makepeace urged significantly, in a deep whisper. ‘The other letters.’
‘How do you mean?’ Blindly, Osborne felt around on the floor for more papers.
‘The threats, you know. The pitchfork, the dibber. Surely you know by now that Gordon means every word he writes.’
Osborne frowned, confused. ‘No, it was our chief sub who wrote these,’ he said, his heart so filled with sadness that it welled in his throat and almost choked him. ‘Sorry I didn’t tell you, but I only just worked it out myself. Can you believe it? She hates me that much.’
There was a menacing laugh from Makepeace, but Osborne was too unhappy to notice. ‘You know who I mean? Michelle, in the office. Is she jealous, do you think? Why couldn’t she tell me some other way?’
Instead of offering an opinion, however, Makepeace told him to shut up. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ he hissed, in that now wearily familiar ding-ding warning-bell tone of his. ‘Gordon wrote these!’
‘No, really –’
‘Gordon.’
‘N –’ Belatedly Osborne caught the unmissable gist, and quickly reconsidered his position. ‘Oh yes, you’re right,’ he said, promptly.
‘Thanks.’
There was silence. Osborne reached for his torch, turned it on, and pretended to fiddle with it aimlessly, while trying to get a partial view of Makepeace. He whistled a tune, waved the torch, cuddled the rabbit and concentrated hard on being somewhere else. After all, what he saw of Makepeace in fractions and spectral glimpses – a gash of vermilion lipstick, for a start – did not encourage him to wish he were here.
‘Actually I was worried about you,’ he said conversationally. ‘People seemed to think you had been in the shed when it burned down.’
‘I was.’ Makepeace had moved closer. His voice was quite loud.
‘Yes, but, well – they also thought, ha ha, you were dead.’
‘Which I am, of course. In a manner of speaking.’
Recognizing the need to tread delicately at this juncture, Osborne said merely, ‘Oh?’
‘I just rose from the ashes, that’s all.’
‘Nice. Mm. I see.’
‘And now I’m G. Clarke of Honiton.’
‘Did you say –? Oh. Well, that’s great for you. Great. Congratulations.’
‘And I have a destiny.’
‘Smashing.’
‘Which is why I’m here with you.’
‘Oh. I mean, goody.’
There seemed little to say.
‘Where did you get the lipstick?’
‘At Dunquenchin, of course.’
‘Suits you.’
‘Thanks. Hey, you can call me Gordon, if you like.’
‘I’ll try.’
Osborne sighed. He wondered how long he could keep this up. Humouring Makepeace was not his greatest natural talent. And perhaps he shouldn’t try so hard, in any case. Because whatever he did, it was obviously simply a matter of time before the little bastard punched him on the nose.
‘I don’t suppose it struck you,’ ventured Makepeace at last, ‘how closely I resembled Gordon in the first place?’
‘You’re right,’ said Osborne. ‘Yes, I do see what you mean. Absolutely. Although I suppose what did slightly confuse me, why I didn’t think you were identical twins separated at birth,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘was the extraordinary difference in height.’
‘Meaning?’
Osborne was glad, now, to be in the pitch dark. He let it out.
‘He’s a lot taller than you, that’s all. You know. Tall.’
At which point, from out of the blackness, Makepeace hit him so hard on the jaw that it knocked him unconscious. And that was that.
So now, next morning, Osborne was alone with the rabbit again, in this draughty shed in a deserted garden centre (winter opening: weekends only). Goodness knows how Makepeace had acquired the strength to shift him, but he’d done it somehow, possibly with the aid of the bike. Rubbing his sore, bruised face, Osborne thought of Angela and sighed. She was such a wonderful person, he was sorry he had let her down. Manderley, oh yes. Last night he dreamed he went to Manderley again. He hoped she hadn’t noticed his disappearance; he hoped (with just a smidgen of self-pity) that she would hereafter have a nice life without him. He sniffed. He wanted to be with her. But unfortunately he was tied up at the moment, at the mercy of a short-house know-all transvestite with colossal delusions and a surprisingly effective right hook.
Makepeace, of course, had crept back upstairs in Dunquenchin for a final blast of Phototropism before fulfilling his grisly destiny. Luckily all the residents were presently at Angela’s (at this precise moment, in fact, all were staring aghast at the noxious pile of sick that had suddenly appeared on Trent Carmichael’s footwear), so the B&B was empty. It was true, as Gordon’s dad had suggested, that someone had been tampering with the program. Makepeace, whose understanding of advanced computer science was naturally almost as comprehensive as his knowledge of the twenty-six different words for ‘under the weather’ in Norwegian, had tweaked the acceleration to its maximum after his very first session. None of that gradual, delicate, eyelid lily-pond nonsense for Makepeace. He was a small man in a hurry.
Nothing in Norwegian poetry had prepared him for Phototropism. It was a revelation, an epiphany. It caught him up, wrenched him, forced him to grow and reach. Unfortunately it is quite true that people, unlike plants, do not grow unless they are forced to, or unless someone takes an active interest on their behalf. Left to themselves, they stop. So it was arguable that Makepeace deserved the privilege of Phototropism, since he was merely compensating for a lifetime as a loveless retard unchallenged by adversity. But alas, it also helped him identify with Gordon, with whom (as we have seen) he was increasingly infatuated. He plugged in, switched on and screeched outwards like the winds of hell until his body filled the universe.
At Angela’s, Michelle was studying the hand and getting impatient. Unlike Trent Carmichael, she was extremely good at deduction, and in fifteen minutes of urgent questioning had pieced together enough information to know that Osborne had disappeared; that Makepeace, previously feared dead, had probably abducted him; and that a mysterious nameless rabbit was also somehow crucially involved. Moreover, as an expert on S is for … Secateurs! (having discussed its plot with her mother on many macabre occasions), she had quickly deduced that this fake hand had been buried in the garden ten years ago by Trent and Barney (precisely in the manner of the two adult male conspirators in the book) in the misguided belief that it belonged to the corpse of Margaret’s father.
Since Trent seemed unable to grasp this point for himself, she took him aside and explained it to him.
‘You see, if it had been a real hand, it would have decomposed.’
‘I know that.’
‘And it’s not a real hand.’ She paused. ‘So it didn’t.’
‘All right, OK,’ he conceded miserably.
‘So why do I detect a twinge of reluctance to accept it?’ she said. She was slightly irritated. For someone who had just heard the happy news that he took no part in a terrible long-ago patricidal carve-up – or more precisely, that no terrible long-ago patricidal carve-up had taken place at all – he seemed less than properly relieved.
‘It’s just that all these years –’ He broke off.
All these years what? thought Michelle, her heart suddenly jerking and flipping in her chest like a yo-yo doing loop-the-loop. All these years, you have depended on the idea that your soul was smeared with guilt? I do love you, she thought, her yo-yo melting behind her ribs. You are so wonderfully twisted.
‘All these years what?’ she encouraged him gently.
Trent Carmichael screwed up his face as though about to spit. ‘It’s just that all these years that cow has been making a fool of me.’
Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Angela’s eyes, ears, nose and throat were reacquainting themselves with the cocktails and packet-snacks of the previous night, while Gordon stood manfully beside her with a towel and a bottle of water, humming it’s-all-right-I’m-not-looking tunes from Showboat and being careful not to mention undercooked eggs; and Lillian, who had been forced to realize that her cherished conspiracy theory against Osborne was precisely wrong in every respect, was making a private phone call from the hall. We will listen in on this conversation, but a word of warning is first required: under the strain of recent developments – not least the drama of Angela’s unexpected projectile vomiting – Lillian’s baby-talk had deepened so profoundly that it now scarcely qualified as language at all.
‘Bunny? Oh, hey-wo bunny, issmeegen bunny.’ [Greetings Bunny, it’s me again, also called Bunny.]
She waited while Mister Bunny yelled, ‘Where are you, what’s going on?’ and simply took no notice. Being in Honiton on the trail of a missing ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist was an impossible answer to frame within the regressive vocabulary available.
‘How Dexie doin, poor ted-babe?’ [How fares Dexter, the sick little bear?]
‘So sorry, bunny, not home. But soon as poss.’ [Full of regrets not to be home yet, all will be revealed in the fullness of time.] ‘Mishu.’ [More regrets.]
‘Oops, money don. So spensive. [We are about to run out of time; the rate is high.] ‘Bwye!’ [Bye!] ‘Tiss, tiss.’ [Kiss kiss.]
Only when she replaced the receiver did she notice Gordon’s dad watching her from the kitchen door, his face contorted in a grimace of pain.
‘Wassamat – I mean, what’s the matter?’
Gordon’s dad came towards her and put a sympathetic hand on her arm.
‘I’m sorry if this seems rude,’ he said, ‘but were you really talking to somebody? Or just pretending?’
Lillian blushed, and picked at the fluff on her sleeve.
‘Does it matter?’ she said at last.
‘Not to me, no. But I ought to warn you: do that when my niece Margaret is in earshot, and you’ll end up reviewed by Professor Anthony Clare in the Sunday Times Books section.’
They walked through the kitchen and outside into the garden again. A wind was rocking the trees, blowing ashes and leaves in swirls and loops, making Lillian feel strange and light-headed. Tim had just told her that Gordon was the proprietor who’d sacked her, but she couldn’t feel angry about it; she could never dislike this nice man, Gordon’s dad. Come Into the Garden was another world. Let Clement take her standard lamp if he wanted to: what did she care? If anyone had offered her a lumpy cup-soup with croûtons at this moment, she would have rejected it utterly, waved it away, as an unwelcome reminder of Angela’s vomit, nothing more.
‘I don’t think I’ve met Margaret,’ she said. ‘Is she the one everyone says is a cow?’
‘That’s right. She was writing a book about Tim – your colleague, yes? – but we burned the notes. He seems suddenly a great deal happier now.’
‘Tim never mentioned Margaret at the office, you know.’
‘Not even when they split up?’
‘No. But then we didn’t talk about our private lives. I didn’t know Michelle had a boyfriend. I just knew she wrote mad letters to Osborne. And I suppose, now I come to think of it, that personally I never talked about Mister Bunny – sorry, I mean, Jeff. No, hang on, no, not Jeff, what is it?’
‘Your husband?’
‘Mm. Jack. Jerry. George.’
They surveyed the ruined shed. Neither of them quite knew why they were doing it, or why they’d suddenly gone quiet.
‘Why did you call yourself Miss Dexter?’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘I liked the stuffed bunny-rabbit.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I sent it a lettuce leaf for breakfast.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you fond of Osborne?’
‘I suppose I must be. But not the way Michelle is. She wants to stick sprigs of rosemary up his nose and use his erect member to make holes in potting compost.’
‘You’d never guess, to look at her.’
Lillian laughed.
‘Could you fancy a walk into town?’ said Gordon’s dad, offering his arm. The gesture reminded her of Osborne.
‘That would be lovely.’
He opened the gate for her, and they set off down the lane.
‘I’m sorry about Come Into the Garden. Were you there a very long time?’
‘It must have been good, then?’
There was a pause.
‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not good. Just safe.’
‘Who in the name of alimentary tracts are – all – these people?’ barked Angela, hurling herself on to a soft sofa, her face white and shiny, her hair sticking flat to her head. ‘Who in particular is that woman shoving her body at Trent Carmichael and why is she waving an amputated mitt?’
‘She’s another of my sacked employees,’ said Gordon glumly, forgetting that she didn’t know this yet.
‘What? Are you Digger Enterprises?’ gasped Michelle, looking for confirmation to Tim, who nodded. ‘Good God.’ Stunned, she sat down and wrung her hands – her own, then the fake one, and then all three together.
‘So are you from the gardening magazine?’ asked Carmichael. ‘Not a nun, after all?’
Angela exchanged glances with Gordon and leaned forward. ‘I used to play scenes like this when I did Shakespeare,’ she whispered. ‘They’ll be talking about moles on their father’s cheek soon.’ He smiled. She spoke up. ‘Anyone else need to know who anyone else is? Feel free, I mean it. Since we are surely on the verge of clearing up a lot of misunderstandings, we might as well start with present company.’ She looked around. ‘You, sir!’ she pointed at Tim, who jumped. ‘Who the hell are you? And Gordon, are you aware that your dad just went down the road with a lady in a pink coat whom nobody knows from Zsa Zsa Gabor?’
‘Oh, that was Lillian,’ chorused Tim, Michelle and Gordon.
Angela raised her eyes.
‘And what does Lillian do, when she’s at home?’
‘Well, at an educated guess,’ said Michelle, ‘probably not much more than she does at work.’
‘What was the best thing about being a secretary?’ asked Gordon’s dad, as they strolled past Dunquenchin and down towards the Chimneypot nursery on the way to the shops.
‘The best thing about being a secretary?’ she repeated. She blinked, and thought quite hard, but somehow nothing would come.
‘I mean, did you take a pride in it?’
The question was definitely in English, but Lillian still seemed puzzled by it. She stopped, lit a cigarette and shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she grimaced helplessly, ‘perhaps we should talk about you instead.’
‘I’m genuinely interested, really. When we took the decision to close down the magazine, we came and saw the office at the weekend. I probably saw your desk.’
‘Look, it’s really not interesting.’
‘It is, to me.’
‘All right. Mainly my job entailed a mail-sack and a pair of tongs, and the phone ringing, and messengers turning up, and the best bit was systematically throwing away all the readers’ letters to Ted’s Tips, Dear Donald and Katie’s Cuttings, because it meant Michelle had to make them all up in the evenings.’
‘You don’t like Michelle?’
‘Ha!’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s supercilious, arch, martyrish, hostile –’
‘So you threw away the letters to Dear Donald?’
‘Yeah. Amongst other things.’ Lillian took a long drag on the cigarette and then chucked it into some dry leaves by the side of the road.
‘You can start fires like that, you know.’
‘Oh, give me a break.’
‘Sorry.’
They walked on.
‘I want to ask you something personal. When we looked around the office, I saw a corner with a lampstand and a square of carpet – was that yours?’
‘Yes.’ She giggled.
‘Well, the funny thing is that I assumed the person who worked there must be sixty years old, at least. So I’m a bit puzzled. Here you are, talking to your husband like you’re two and a half, and acting at work like you’re sixty. So what I want to know is: when do you get to be your real age – when you are, if I may say so without sounding creepy and smarmy like that smarmy creep Trent Carmichael, in your prime?’
Lillian looked crestfallen.
He hesitated, but on the other hand, having got this far, he thought he’d better continue.
‘I’m not a very clever man, and I don’t have Margaret’s knowledge, let alone her inquisitive inclinations. But on the other hand, I do wonder whether – good lord, did you see that?’
Lillian wiped a tear on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘What?’
‘There’s someone in the garden centre.’
‘Why shouldn’t there be?’
‘Because it’s Thursday.’
‘Oh.’
‘Someone’s broken in. And this is going to sound rather odd, but it appeared to be a chimp or a midget in a thin blue frock. You didn’t see it, Lillian? On the bike?’
Lillian smiled weakly. ‘I was thinking about something else.’
‘You don’t mind me calling you Lillian?’
‘As long as you promise not to call me Bunny.’
‘So what do you want to do?’
‘I’m thinking.’
But Lillian thought first.
‘Didn’t Tim say something about seeing Osborne abducted by a midget in a frock? I mean, it may be a different midget, of course, but –’
‘You’re right. I’d better get the others. You stay here and keep watch and I’ll run back. Can you do that?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’ He put his hand towards her, but didn’t touch. ‘Right, I’ll go.’
‘Just one thing, though. I think Tim also mentioned a pitchfork. And it seems to me, if I rack my memory, that this may be significant, and have something to do with nipples. The figure you saw, did it have a pitchfork too?’
‘I believe it did.’
‘Well, in that case you’d better get your skates on.’
‘Alone at last!’ cackled Makepeace, flinging wide the door of the Resteezy shed, and standing arms akimbo like the jolly Green Giant. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha.’
Osborne looked up wearily. He was a patient man by nature, but he was getting tired of this.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, think what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘We’ve been alone lots of times. We were alone in the van coming down here, alone in our room at Dunquenchin. We’ve been alone at your flat, and at mine, and in pubs and down the caff. And besides, there’s the rabbit here now –’
‘Stop quibbling,’ said Makepeace.
‘But –’
‘Stop it.’
Makepeace struggled to recapture his former confidence. He went ‘Ha ha ha, ha ha ha,’ again, which helped.
‘It seems to me you’re not taking this seriously enough, my lily-skinned friend. Why do you think I brought you here? Why, to fulfil my fantasies with you! The whole lot. Hose, pitchfork, lawn-feed, everything – even the dibber.’
Osborne looked at him. At last he’d fallen in, after all this time. It was so simple. This man was mad.
‘You’re mad,’ he said.
‘I’m not.’
‘You look like a chimp.’
‘I don’t.’
‘And there’s a woman behind you, about to hit you on the head with a shovel.’
‘No, there isn’t.’
‘There is, you know,’ said Lillian from behind, and with a fabulous ringing dung! noise, Osborne’s forty-eight hours in captivity were finally brought to a close.